E.gress travels to Kilkenny | Thursday 26 May

Kilkenny is the next stop on the E.gress exhibition tour | Thursday 26 May 2016

Kilkenny Castle Parade Tower, Kilkenny

Presented in partnership with Butler Gallery

FILM SCREENING, LIVE POETRY & DISCUSSION EVENT

12.30pm – 2pm

Poet Kerry Hardie has created a new poem in response to E.gress which she will read at the event. Artist Marie Brett will then be joined in conversation by Bairbre-Ann Harkin, Butler Gallery Education Curator, poet Kerry Hardie and Tina Leonard, Head of Advocacy and Public Affairs at the Alzheimer Society of Ireland, particularly exploring ideas of the viewed and the viewer within the work. There will be an opportunity for questions and comments from the audience.

Marie Brett is presenting these Kilkenny events in partnership with Butler Gallery, supported by The Office of Public Works.

SPEAKERS BIOGRAPHIES

Bairbre-Ann Harkin is the Education Curator at Butler Gallery, Kilkenny. Before this, she worked as Education Assistant / Access Officer of Dublin Contemporary 2011 and completed an internship within the Education Department of the Museum of Modern Art New York in 2010. Bairbre-Ann is a founding member of Azure, a collaborative partnership to explore the potential for greater participation of people with dementia in cultural settings in Ireland and has delivered Azure programmes and training at Turner Prize 2013, Dun Laoghaire LexIcon, and National Gallery of Art, Lithuania. Bairbre‐Ann is a graduate of Law with French Law in University College Dublin and holds a PG Dip. in Contemporary Art History from Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Read an interview with Bairbre-Ann by Colette Sheridan in The Irish Times:

Kerry Hardie is a poet and a member of Aosdána. Educated in the University of York and once a journalist for the BBC, she is now known for her poetry and novels. She has won The Hennessy Prize, and awards include the Michael Hartnett Award, the Friends Provident National Poetry Prize, the Patrick and Kathleen Kavanagh Award and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award. Scholarships and residencies have taken her around the world to countries including Australia, France and China.

Jennifer Matthews, in Poetry International (q.d.; 2011)

Hardie’s poetry is brave, steadily confronting both the deaths of her loved ones and her own experiences with illness as an ME sufferer. Her collections contain gentle, but insistent, works of memento mori … What makes her work exceptional is how skilfully she illustrates the connection between humanity and the cycles in the natural world. Poems and lives move through the unstoppable clockwork of seasons in her collections… A unique aspect of Hardie’s poetry is the hope that is present in all her collections. She guides us through tragedy, reassuring us but never romanticising the true nature of life.

Tina Leonard is Head of Advocacy & Public Affairs at the Alzheimer Society of Ireland. An experienced advocate of fifteen years plus, Tina has most recently worked as a consumer journalist, author, media commentator and communications consultant. Prior to that Tina was Director of Ireland’s European Consumer Centre for nine years

Marie Brett is a visual artist working in photography, film, sculpture and immersive installation. She produces work which recurrently questions culturally shunned and difficult topics, often exploring ideas of loss, crisis and human suffering. She is the 2016 artist-in-residence at University College Dublin, College of Social Sciences and Law and a recipient of numerous awards, including this years Arts Council Touring & Dissemination Award, to tour the film E.gress through Ireland with an extensive events programme. The artist’s Art/Life practice is multi-layered and informed by research collaborations which are framed within non-stable contexts. Her work is held in public collections both nationally and internationally. She studied visual art at Goldsmiths, London University, receiving an M.A. and a B.A. (1st class) and has writing published in both Ireland and Finland.